What we might call the drama and symbolism of everyday life was also evident in certain art works on show at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1858, which opened at the beginning of May. As a commentary on unhappy marriages, Augustus Egg’s untitled triptych, known informally as Past and Present, attracted attention. The story it tells in its three pictures is the tragedy of a family. The first scene shows a middle-class husband’s discovery of his wife’s adultery; he is reading a letter revealing her secret while she lies inconsolable on the floor and the couple’s two daughters play cards across the room. The scene is reminiscent of those portrayed in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of domestic life. Though the representation is realistic – a solid family room with heavily draped tables and curtains – the symbols are many. The wife’s bracelets have snake motifs; one painting on the wall represents the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, while another, showing a storm-tossed boat at sea, is entitled The Abandoned; and the children’s house of cards, propped on a book by Balzac, doyen of French fiction with its sexual liaisons and fallen women, is collapsing. The other two scenes represent the fallout from the discovery. One shows the daughters, after their father’s death, living in genteel poverty in a garret, while the other features the destitute mother taking refuge under one of the Adelphi arches by the Thames, a well-known haunt of prostitutes, criminals, and suicides. Though Egg gave the piece no title, it was exhibited with an explanatory description: ‘August the 4th – Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!’79
Egg’s painting attracted a lot of critical attention, some of it suggesting that the subject was too painful for art. Another contemporary interior of the Dutch type also caught the eye, though this time it was a representation of a real couple in their own home. Robert Tait’s A Chelsea Interior is a small but remarkably detailed portrait of Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane in their modest house in Chelsea. Both Carlyles commented on the progress of the painting over the year prior to its exhibition, Carlyle complaining of Tait ‘steaming about all day’ in the ‘intolerable’ heat of July 1857 with his ‘photographing (very malodorous) apparatus’, and remarking six months later that the artist had borrowed his dressing gown and shoes to paint in his studio. For her part, Jane marvelled that Tait took a whole day to paint her workbox and seemed determined to represent everything in her drawing room with ‘Vandyke fidelity’.80 As the Carlyles were the most famous literary couple in London, the painting did not need to name them in its title. An irony only fully revealed to the public after both their deaths was that their marriage was not a happy one; indeed Jane’s letters and private journal reveal that she had recently suffered a sort of breakdown brought about by chronic ill health, resentment at Carlyle’s spending all his time in his study writing his multi-volume history of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and most of all by her obsessive jealousy of Carlyle’s chivalrous attentions to Lady Ashburton, who indulged Carlyle while neglecting Jane’s feelings.81
The most celebrated painting in the exhibition in 1858 was another work presenting a portrait of the times in minute, almost photographic, detail. William Powell Frith’s huge panorama The Derby Day, which, like Egg’s triptych, is now in the Tate collection (A Chelsea Interior hangs appropriately in the Carlyles’ drawing room in their house in Cheyne Row, now a museum), caused such a sensation that a barrier had to be put round it and a policeman set to guard it from the press of visitors. Taking a favourite subject of the British people, particularly the inhabitants of London, who flocked in their thousands to Epsom races for the Derby each summer, Frith captured the ‘bustle and life’ of the great event, as the Annual Register noted in its round-up of 1858. Bentley’s Miscellany consoled those who were not actually going to the Derby that year – the race was held on Wednesday, 19 May – by assuring them that they ‘may remain at home content if they pay their shilling to see this wonderful picture – and succeed in getting near enough to see it’.82 Frith made a large amount of money from engravings and subsequent showings of this famous painting, the first since David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners of 1822 to require a railing for protection.83
All human life was in The Derby Day, just as it was at the event itself. The toffs attended annually in their carriages, parliament regularly took the day off, the middle classes borrowed or rented coaches and cabs, or in recent years came by train, and the lower classes walked, camping overnight beside the racecourse. Gypsies, sellers of everything from cool drinks to flowers, acrobats, clowns, and conmen converged on Epsom Downs in Surrey every year for the big race. Frith’s painting shows a man whose watch has just been stolen by someone behind him and a group being conned by a thimble-rigger, a common trickster at fairgrounds and outdoor fêtes. The painting, like the verbal descriptions of the occasion in newspapers, adopts an inclusive, if not indulgent, attitude towards the criminal element present at the great occasion.84 G.A. Sala, ever with his journalist’s finger on the pulse of daily life, described in 1859 with consciously Dickensian plenitude how everybody, from the top to the bottom of society, goes to the Derby:
Everybody there, on the rail and on the road, on the Derby Day. The House of Lords, and the House of Commons, the Bar, the Bench, the Army, the Navy, and the Desk; May Fair and Rag Fair, Park Lane and Petticoat Lane, the Chapel Royal and Whitechapel, Saint James’s and Saint Giles’s. Give me a pen plucked from the wing of a roc (the most gigantic bird known, I think); give me a scroll of papyrus as long as the documents in a Chancery suit; give me a river for an ink-bottle, and then I should be scant of space to describe the road that leads to the course, the hill, the grand stand, the gipsies, the Ethiopian serenaders, the clouds of horsemen, like Bedouins of the desert, flying towards Tattenham Corner [a famous part of Epsom Downs racecourse]; the correct cards that never are correct; the dog that always gets on the course and never can get off again, and that creates as much amusement in his agony as though he had been Mr Merryman [an allusion to a recently published ‘magazine of miscellaneous mirth’].85 The all-absorbing, thrilling, soul-riveting race.86
Derby Day in 1858 attracted even more attention than usual; all the newspapers grasped with gratitude the possibilities for puns and jokes and connections between sport and politics, since the new prime minister, arrived in power at the end of February after the surprise fall of Palmerston, was the horse-mad scion of the horse-mad family which had inaugurated the race in 1780.87 Would Lord Derby’s horse Toxopholite, the bookmakers’ favourite, win this year’s race at a crucial time for its owner’s career, while the India Bill and other tricky legislation were passing through parliament? Derby had no majority and, as it happened, was facing a serious motion of censure over India just at the time of the great race. Would his government survive? And would Disraeli, finally making it up the ‘greasy pole’ as far as chancellor of the Exchequer, be more than a flash in the pan as part of a government which was likely to be short-lived? What would the two unlikely allies, the quiet aristocrat and the flamboyant middle-class chancer, achieve as this hottest summer reached its peak?
All three main protagonists in this story of the hot summer of 1858 were middle-aged. Two of them, Darwin and Disraeli, were late developers in terms of achievements in their chosen fields, while Dickens had known roaring success with his early work Pickwick Papers, published in 1837, when he was twenty-five. In 1858 he reached a crossroads, when he nearly became unhinged and feared losing the good will of the public. He and Disraeli were constantly in the public eye during the summer of 1858, while Darwin, going through as violent a whirlwind of emotions as either of the other two, lived in quiet obscurity outside London, though only a short train ride away from the sweltering capital.
None of the three met during 1858. Disraeli and Dickens had met in the past; they both took part in a fundraising event in Manchester in October 1843, chaired by Dick
ens.88 In his few recorded references to Disraeli in his correspondence Dickens was less than complimentary; he disapproved of Disraeli’s abandonment of Sir Robert Peel during the debates on the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and he offered only faint praise of Disraeli’s voting with Lord John Russell on one of the failed motions to allow Rothschild to take his seat. ‘It delights me that D’Israeli has done such justice to his conscience-less self, in regard of the Jews’, he wrote in July 1849.89 For his part Disraeli, in an effort to avoid replying directly to a correspondent’s request in 1857 for an opinion on Dickens’s Little Dorrit, claimed that he had lost all zest for fiction, either reading or writing it.90 He had earlier enjoyed applying names from Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist to acquaintances. He told his sister Sarah in 1838 that Sir Charles Grey was called ‘Mr Pickwick’ in the House of Commons, ‘being in his appearance, spectacles, and style of oratory, the “very prototype”’.91 The following year he described a conversation with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton on leaving parliament one day; discussing the less reputable publishing firms in London, the two friends ‘settled [Richard] Bentley was Fagin; [Henry] Colburn the artful Dodger; S[aunders] and Otley, Claypole’.92
Neither Dickens nor Disraeli seems to have been aware of Darwin and his work, even after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859; certainly their surviving letters make no mention of Darwin. He knew the novels of the other two. He liked reading fiction, and especially admired George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Silas Marner.93 Like Disraeli he referred in passing to some of the characters Dickens’s early fiction had made legendary; Mr Pickwick’s idiosyncratic servant Sam Weller is mentioned or quoted, as are Sketches by Boz and Mr Snagsby from Bleak House.94 And he remembered in 1864 how one of Disraeli’s novels had featured ‘some splendid sneers at us transmutationists; a young lady saying “oh it is proved by geology” that we came from crows or something of the kind’.95 The novel he had in mind was Tancred (1847), in which Lady Constance Rawleigh recommends that a friend read The Revelations of Chaos (a knowing reference to Robert Chambers’s sensational Vestiges of Creation), in which, she says, everything is proved by geology: ‘We were fishes and I believe we shall be crows.’96
Darwin and Dickens, though neither knew it, had shared a moment in June 1838, when they were both elected to the Athenaeum Club, founded in 1824 to celebrate intellectual and literary attainments. The club building on Pall Mall was undergoing renovation in 1838, and the committee decided to elect forty new members at once in order to finance the work.97 Dickens was an obvious choice, with Pickwick Papers behind him and Oliver Twist appearing serially in Bentley’s Magazine in 1838. Darwin, not long back from his voyage on the Beagle and not yet well known even in the scientific world, owed his election to one of those serendipitous ‘accidental fatalities’ which he liked to trace with hindsight as he looked back on his career. Just as he delighted in the unexpectedly fateful connection between his uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s generous intervention with his father and his own success in overcoming the distrust of the eccentric Captain FitzRoy about the shape of his nose, so he spelt out the connection between his father’s dislike of cheese and his own election to the Athenaeum. His autobiography tells that his father, Dr Robert Darwin, had attended years earlier to the 1st marquess of Lansdowne and disclosed his aversion to cheese, after which the Lansdowne family took an interest in Dr Darwin’s family, with the result that a later Lord Lansdowne proposed Charles for membership in 1838:
When forty new members (the forty thieves as they were called) were added to the Athenaeum Club, there was much canvassing to be one of them; and without my having asked any one, Lord Lansdowne proposed me and got me elected. If I am right in my supposition, it was a queer concatenation of events that my father not eating cheese half-a-century before in Holland led to my election as a member of the Athenaeum.98
(Disraeli’s rather different experience with the Athenaeum was to be blackballed in 1832, after trying very hard to get elected, and again in 1835. He met antagonism from those he had attacked or ridiculed in his novels and journalism, and suffered from a general belief that he was unscrupulous and not respectable, despite his sober, scholarly father Isaac having been a founder member of the club. Only in 1866, after nearly thirty years of political service, at the age of sixty-one, did Disraeli find the doors of the club open to him.99)
Despite having the luck to be elected before he had achieved anything, Darwin paid little attention to London Clubland. Unlike Dickens and Disraeli, he did not frequent literary or political parties or make speeches on public stages, even in the realm of science. He was retiring by nature and because of his ill health and obsessive working practices had become almost a recluse in his house in the village of Down, in Kent. Although he had scientific friends in London and was a member of various scientific societies which met in the city, he did not attend many meetings and seldom spent more than a few days away from home. He owed his London friends a recognised debt of gratitude for keeping him informed of progress and for ensuring that he gained the credit for the discovery of natural selection; alone, he would not have battled for fame and recognition.
The connections – albeit indirect – that can be discerned between the life experiences of these three great Victorians emerge in rich detail in the context of the lives of other Londoners during the hot summer, of men sitting in stifling chambers deciding on legislation, on costs, on cases of divorce and lunacy, on membership of an exclusive club, on methods of improving public health, on curing diseases, on the value of technical advances or scientific papers, on the topic of the next day’s front page and editorial; also men and women involved in religious controversy, entertainment, fashion, literature, and art. Connections, sometimes passing and contingent, sometimes fundamental and vital, exist between the most unlikely people and things. What do Disraeli and Brunel have in common? Or Disraeli and Karl Marx, living in exile in north London and commenting on the affairs of the day in German and American newspapers? Frith’s Derby Day and Brunel’s Great Eastern? That ship’s construction, the Robinson divorce case, and the promotion of contraception? The plot to assassinate Napoleon III, a Dickensian character, and the Garrick Club affair? Derby Day and the writing of Adam Bede? A meeting of the Linnaean Society and the death of Darwin’s youngest child? India and the Thames? The Divorce Act and James Rarey, the ‘Great American Horse Tamer’? As they negotiated their lives day by day, Darwin, Dickens, Disraeli, and their contemporaries had no certain sense of how their circumstances might change or their problems be resolved, while we can make use of the historian’s gift of hindsight to ‘trace the pattern’ of the ‘atoms’ as they fell on the protagonists in the hot months of 1858.
CHAPTER TWO
May 1858
Dickens in distress
The inauguration of the Annual Exhibition of Pictures and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts was celebrated on Saturday by the usual anniversary festival. It was attended with befitting pomp and circumstance. Ministers of State, legislators, chiefs of the army and navy, dignitaries of the Church, the judicial Bench, the representatives of literature, science, commerce, and manufactures, all assembled on the occasion to pay their common tribute of homage to art in its own chosen temple.1
WITH THIS RHETORICAL FLOURISH The Times of Monday, 3 May 1858 began its account of the grand banquet held on 1 May at the Royal Academy, then located in the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square. Dinner commenced at 6 p.m., chaired by the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Eastlake, and the roll call of those present was indeed prestigious. The prime minister, Lord Derby, was there, along with his son Lord Stanley; the chancellor of the Exchequer, Disraeli; the home secretary, Spencer Walpole; the lord chief justice, Lord Campbell (the leading judge in the newly operative Divorce Court); and the lord chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, intransigent opponent of the bill to allow Jewish representation in parliament. Also present were the chief members of the Liberal opposition, Lord Palmerston, Lord John R
ussell, and William Gladstone. David Salomons attended in his capacity as lord mayor of London, the first Jewish holder of the position; like his cousin by marriage Lionel de Rothschild, he had been elected to parliament but could not represent his constituents in Greenwich because of the requirement to take the Christian oath. (When, some months after this dinner, the law was changed and Rothschild was able to take his seat, Salomons stood again in Greenwich and was elected in 1859.2)
Others present were Archibald Tait, the progressive bishop of London, and Samuel Wilberforce, the ultra-conservative bishop of Oxford. The duke of Cambridge made a speech on behalf of the army, Professor Michael Faraday represented the scientific community, and the presidents of the royal colleges of physicians and surgeons were there in their representative capacity too. Those two giants of fiction, Dickens and Thackeray, attended on behalf of literature. Both responded to the toast raised in their honour. Dickens declared that literature, ‘your sister, whom I represent, is strong and healthy [here The Times reports ‘a laugh’]; she has a strong affection for and an undying interest in you; and it is always a very great gratification to her to see herself so well remembered within these walls, and to know that she is an honoured guest at your hospitable board (Cheers and laughter)’. Thackeray followed, with a more personal reply, in which he talked warmly of his ‘friend’ Dickens, telling his audience that if it had not been for Dickens, ‘I should most likely never have been included in the toast which you have been pleased to drink’:
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